Like the Industrial or the Einsteinian Revolution, the Space Race is a trope, or way of organizing historical events into a story that makes sense. In this story, the two great powers that emerged after World War Two—the United States and Soviet Union—competed to send communications satellites, dogs, and people into outer space…

In fantasy stories, charlatans in fancy robes promise to turn lead into gold. But real alchemists weren’t just mystical misers. They were skilled experimentalists, backed by theories of matter.
And they played a huge role in the development of knowledge about one of our fundamental questions: “what is stuff?”

In this episode of Crash Course History of Science, we travel to the Americas to ask the question, "When are we?" and get some answers. We'll look at the Maya, Inca, and Olmec civilizations and how they recorded their science.

The history of medicine is about two of our big questions: one, what is life? What makes it so special, so fragile, so… goopy!?
Two, how do we know what we know? Why should I take my doctor’s advice? Why are deep-fried Oreos bad for me?
It may be tempting to look at medicine as a science that has simply progressed over time—that medicine used to be bad, and its history is a story of how it got better.

The story picks up where we left off last time, with Einstein writing the president of his new homeland, the United States, urging him to build a nuclear weapon before Hitler. This is the tale of the most destructive force humans have ever unleashed. The Atomic Bomb.

You’ve probably heard of Charles Darwin, but before we get to him, you really need to understand how different people, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tried to answer the same question: “what is life?”

The history of science up until the Cold War is often overshadowed by the Manhattan Project. But, today we are going to talk about advances in biomedicine, or healthcare based on a biological understanding of human bodies and diseases.

The history of discovering what DNA is, what it looks like, and how it works is... complicated. But, in this episode of History of Science, Hank Green does his best to lay out the basics so we can understand the beginnings of Biotechnology.

After World War Two, the applications of basic discoveries in biology took off—and became big business. Today, we’ll look at the rise of Big Pharma and GMO foods. We’ll also discuss how life-science technologies fundamentally changed reproduction: it’s time to invent In Vitro Fertilization and clone a sheep!

Until roughly 1100, there were relatively few places of knowledge-making. Monasteries and abbeys had special rooms called scriptoria where monks copied manuscripts by hand. But the biggest places where knowledge was made were the Gothic cathedrals. Then Universities came along, too. This is the story of those two institutions!

With the question “What is life?” addressed at the molecular level, humanity could finally cure all disease and live forever… Except, not really. It turns out we're complicated.

Over the last four episodes, we’ve examined some of the stories that make up the idea of a “revolution” in knowledge-making in Europe. But we can’t understand this idea fully, without unpacking another one—the so called Age of Exploration. This encompasses a lot of events that happened from 1400 through the 1600s and were driven in part by new ideas about knowledge-making.

Computers and computing have changed a lot over the History of Science but ESPECIALLY over the last 100 years. In this episode of Crash Course History of Science, we have a look at that history around World War Two and how that conflict forced changes in computing.

"Survival of the Fittest" sounds like a great WWE show but today we're talking about that phrase as it relates to Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Darwin and Wallace are at the heart of understanding evolution and natural selection. Today, Hank talks about their wonderful (if not seasick inducing) trips around the world.

It's Earth Science time!!!! In this field, natural philosophers were asking questions like, what’s up with fossils? Are they the remains of extinct organisms? Or are they so-called “sports of nature”—rocks that just happen to look like living things but don’t /mean/ anything? And most importantly, how old is… everything?

We’ve explored the origins of modern biology, the earth sciences, and even the sciences of outer space. Now it’s time to put these disciplines together. It's Ecology time!!!

The study of electricity goes all the way back to antiquity. But, by the time electricity started to become more well known, a few familiar names started to appear. Edison, Galvani, and a few others really changed the way the world worked.

After Darwin blew the doors off the scientific community, a lot of people did some weird and unscientific stuff with his ideas. Francis Galton and a few others decided natural selection could be used to make the human race "better" and came up with Eugenics.

Historians love to debate each other. So some of them pointed out that the first half of this revolution looks a lot different from the second. Let's chat about industry, cars, and Henry Ford.

Sometimes trail blazers of science aren't famous like Darwin or Pasteur. Sometimes they're humble Abbots, just growing peas in the back of their Abbey. This is the story of Gregor Mendel and how his work was done, lost, then found again.